Poetry review – MIGRATIONS: Stuart Henson commends Dominic Fisher’s fluent and effective use of language
Migrations
Dominic Fisher
Blueprint Poetry 2026
ISBN 978-1-7393695-6-9
28pp £7.00
The title-poem of Dominic Fisher’s recent Blueprint pamphlet points up the themes that thread right through it—of language, identity and the crossing of borders. Starting from Keir Starmer’s soundbite ‘We risk becoming an island of strangers’, Fisher addresses an un-named refugee mother who finds herself in a cold, bewildering new place, and establishes a communality that will underpin his argument.
I never was one island, my nation
never was one country
Hinting at Donne’s ‘No man is an island’, he sets out his own Scottish-Irish heritage and shapes it towards the conclusion of his first premise:
Our selves are plural, our families
like coastline broken or joined in a silver sea.
Waves and shorelines, sea-birds and stars recur in the pamphlet with fugal delicacy, so though the family/coastline simile slips a bit in the mind’s grasp, it functions well enough in context, with the added resonance of Richard II’s historically ‘precious stone set in a silver sea’. Fisher’s own language is often allusive and disarming, blending the ordinary with the lyrical in ways that make you pay attention. He knows language is what binds and separates us, and as the second part of the syllogism develops, he speaks to the mother directly:
You wept with cold and frustration you said
getting the baby into donated clothes.
You told us your friend went out to find sugar
without knowing the word or how it was sold.
And having woken us to the implications of what an ‘island of strangers’ might feel like, he draws attention back to his other antecedents, the English ‘wives / of sailors settled in peaceful parishes’ who ‘did the flowers in their churches, praying / for sons at war to come home across the sea.’ What more English than to ‘do the flowers’? What more evocative image than those ‘peaceful parishes’? But this is an artful poem. Consider the way that simple phrase ‘across the sea’ can instantly unite the war-torn generation of one family with those more recent mothers who’ve also lived through conflict, and crossed the sea.
There are several other poems that deal, directly or obliquely, with the migrant experience: “Nura”,which follows the flight and dogged persistence of another refugee-parent, and the sardonic ‘You haven’t lost your accent have you’ that leaves you wincing at the well-meant conversational gambits of a hapless host. My own preference is for the lyrical and rather lovely “Exile variations” spoken by one who’s homesick for a gentler, more humane society he or she has left behind ‘criss-crossing borders’. Once you’ve read “Migrations” and “Mother Tongue” it’s not difficult to see in this one the poet himself, nostalgic for a homeland ‘where the stars in the glass / are long on the tongue, soft in the ear’, a place as mythical and real as George Mackay Brown’s Orkney, where ‘the stars are fish or vice versa / and a family of hills has our back.’
Dominic Fisher’s biography describes him as ‘a former English Language teacher’, and if you had to pick a dominant theme for the pamphlet you’d have to say language itself. The voices of migrating geese are heard, ‘some think’, in ‘languages long since lost.’ The speaker of “On the way to say monster” encourages you to ‘pay close attention. Mmmmm, drop the jaw, trap and briefly tap your tongue then let go.’ And the ephemerality of words is caught nicely in “When the Great Library burned” where an anonymous poem
…rose gracefully enough from the library,
shone in fragments, lofty, sparkling round its edges,
neat script, near-perfect syntax, curling as it burned.
You’ve got to admire that word ‘lofty’: airy, wooshy and ironic. I’m not quite sure if our Library is in Alexandria or Rome but the picture glows either way.
One of the best of the language poems, “Learning the language” takes the form of a dialogue, in which the interlocutors seem to be communicating on frequencies outside the conventional audible spectrum:
It sounds like a kind of dead language.
Yes, many of our speakers, like yours, are dead.
Then how many native speakers are there?
None, we don’t have a native land, only landing-places.
Here once gain the notions of language-loss and personal displacement go hand-in-hand.
To tune-in to another’s way of communication requires a flexibility—musical intervals or drum-patterns might function as well as phonemes or as lexical items, ‘petals, lips, wings, anything.’
Just occasionally the linguistic cleverness can push its boundaries towards the cute. ‘The moon’ we’re told in “I was once an official translator of the moon” ‘has no name / for itself, that’s the problem.’ and ‘Once nouns were cloud’ (“Forms of water”). But where invention and ideas come unforced, the images tumble happily over the page, as they do in the beginning of “A rough guide to the dialect”:
As we meet, footpaths
multiply in the air
even while adopted roads
vanish on our tongues.
Chattering and scribbling
our children remake them
though not for us
and not where we expect.
For readers who aren’t familiar with the press, I should add that Fisher’s poems are well-served by Blueprint’s minimalist aesthetic. Plain strong card covers, a confident Calibri-style font, the flower-like cog-wheel colophon, no contents list or page numbers… No malarkey. Just poetry. This sharp, entertaining gathering was a worthy winner of their 2025 pamphlet competition. It deserves some serious attention.
Oct 11 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Dominic Fisher
Poetry review – MIGRATIONS: Stuart Henson commends Dominic Fisher’s fluent and effective use of language
Migrations
Dominic Fisher
Blueprint Poetry 2026
ISBN 978-1-7393695-6-9
28pp £7.00
The title-poem of Dominic Fisher’s recent Blueprint pamphlet points up the themes that thread right through it—of language, identity and the crossing of borders. Starting from Keir Starmer’s soundbite ‘We risk becoming an island of strangers’, Fisher addresses an un-named refugee mother who finds herself in a cold, bewildering new place, and establishes a communality that will underpin his argument.
I never was one island, my nation
never was one country
Hinting at Donne’s ‘No man is an island’, he sets out his own Scottish-Irish heritage and shapes it towards the conclusion of his first premise:
Our selves are plural, our families
like coastline broken or joined in a silver sea.
Waves and shorelines, sea-birds and stars recur in the pamphlet with fugal delicacy, so though the family/coastline simile slips a bit in the mind’s grasp, it functions well enough in context, with the added resonance of Richard II’s historically ‘precious stone set in a silver sea’. Fisher’s own language is often allusive and disarming, blending the ordinary with the lyrical in ways that make you pay attention. He knows language is what binds and separates us, and as the second part of the syllogism develops, he speaks to the mother directly:
You wept with cold and frustration you said
getting the baby into donated clothes.
You told us your friend went out to find sugar
without knowing the word or how it was sold.
And having woken us to the implications of what an ‘island of strangers’ might feel like, he draws attention back to his other antecedents, the English ‘wives / of sailors settled in peaceful parishes’ who ‘did the flowers in their churches, praying / for sons at war to come home across the sea.’ What more English than to ‘do the flowers’? What more evocative image than those ‘peaceful parishes’? But this is an artful poem. Consider the way that simple phrase ‘across the sea’ can instantly unite the war-torn generation of one family with those more recent mothers who’ve also lived through conflict, and crossed the sea.
There are several other poems that deal, directly or obliquely, with the migrant experience: “Nura”,which follows the flight and dogged persistence of another refugee-parent, and the sardonic ‘You haven’t lost your accent have you’ that leaves you wincing at the well-meant conversational gambits of a hapless host. My own preference is for the lyrical and rather lovely “Exile variations” spoken by one who’s homesick for a gentler, more humane society he or she has left behind ‘criss-crossing borders’. Once you’ve read “Migrations” and “Mother Tongue” it’s not difficult to see in this one the poet himself, nostalgic for a homeland ‘where the stars in the glass / are long on the tongue, soft in the ear’, a place as mythical and real as George Mackay Brown’s Orkney, where ‘the stars are fish or vice versa / and a family of hills has our back.’
Dominic Fisher’s biography describes him as ‘a former English Language teacher’, and if you had to pick a dominant theme for the pamphlet you’d have to say language itself. The voices of migrating geese are heard, ‘some think’, in ‘languages long since lost.’ The speaker of “On the way to say monster” encourages you to ‘pay close attention. Mmmmm, drop the jaw, trap and briefly tap your tongue then let go.’ And the ephemerality of words is caught nicely in “When the Great Library burned” where an anonymous poem
…rose gracefully enough from the library,
shone in fragments, lofty, sparkling round its edges,
neat script, near-perfect syntax, curling as it burned.
You’ve got to admire that word ‘lofty’: airy, wooshy and ironic. I’m not quite sure if our Library is in Alexandria or Rome but the picture glows either way.
One of the best of the language poems, “Learning the language” takes the form of a dialogue, in which the interlocutors seem to be communicating on frequencies outside the conventional audible spectrum:
It sounds like a kind of dead language.
Yes, many of our speakers, like yours, are dead.
Then how many native speakers are there?
None, we don’t have a native land, only landing-places.
Here once gain the notions of language-loss and personal displacement go hand-in-hand.
To tune-in to another’s way of communication requires a flexibility—musical intervals or drum-patterns might function as well as phonemes or as lexical items, ‘petals, lips, wings, anything.’
Just occasionally the linguistic cleverness can push its boundaries towards the cute. ‘The moon’ we’re told in “I was once an official translator of the moon” ‘has no name / for itself, that’s the problem.’ and ‘Once nouns were cloud’ (“Forms of water”). But where invention and ideas come unforced, the images tumble happily over the page, as they do in the beginning of “A rough guide to the dialect”:
As we meet, footpaths
multiply in the air
even while adopted roads
vanish on our tongues.
Chattering and scribbling
our children remake them
though not for us
and not where we expect.
For readers who aren’t familiar with the press, I should add that Fisher’s poems are well-served by Blueprint’s minimalist aesthetic. Plain strong card covers, a confident Calibri-style font, the flower-like cog-wheel colophon, no contents list or page numbers… No malarkey. Just poetry. This sharp, entertaining gathering was a worthy winner of their 2025 pamphlet competition. It deserves some serious attention.